Quotes about Contemplation

There was this huge world out there, independent of us human beings and standing before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partly accessible to our inspection and thought. The contemplation of that world beckoned like a liberation.

Do not let Sunday be taken from you. If your soul has no sunday, it becomes an orphan.

The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude.

Get outside. Watch the sunrise. Watch the sunset. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel big or tiny? Because there's something good about feeling both.

Especially for those of us who lived in single cells, you had the time to sit down and think, and we discovered that sitting down just to think is one of the best ways of keeping yourself fresh and able, to be able to address the problems facing you, and you had the opportunity, also, of examining your past.

M]editation is the life of of most other duties; and the view of heaven is the life of meditation (559).

Consideration doth, as it were, open the door between the head and the heart: the understanding having received truths, lays them up in the memory now, consideration is the conveyer of theme from thence to the affections (571).

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, Your religion is not the church you belong to, but the cosmos you live inside of. Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

You can unlock spiritual things only from within.

Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply. I call that kind of deep and calm seeing "contemplation.

I believe contemplation shows us that nothing inside us is as bad as our hatred and denial of the bad. Hating and denying it only complicates our problems. All of life is grist for the mill. Paula D'Arcy puts it, "God comes to us disguised as our life." Everything belongs; God uses everything. There are no dead-ends. There is no wasted energy. Everything